How to Lead Brands That Translate Globally

Summary

Experts of Experience: Episode Summary – "How to Lead Brands That Translate Globally"

Hosted by Lacey Peace and Rose Shocker, presented by Salesforce Customer Success

---

1. Introduction to Global Customer Experience

The episode delves into the complexities of delivering exceptional customer experiences across diverse global markets. Lacey Peace and Rose Shocker welcome Catherine Melchiore and Natalie Kelly, co-authors of Brand Global Adapt Local: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures, to discuss the nuances of scaling brands internationally.

Notable Quote:

Natalie Kelly [00:00]: "In the US we often say the customer is always right. And in Japan, the saying is the customer is God."

---

2. Meet the Authors: Catherine Melchiore & Natalie Kelly

Catherine Melchiore, a seasoned marketing executive with over 25 years at brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike, and Natalie Kelly, Chief Marketing Officer at Zappy with extensive B2B experience, share their journey of collaboration. Their partnership, fostered through LinkedIn, culminated in their co-authored book aimed at guiding brands through global expansion.

Notable Quotes:

Catherine Melchiore [08:12]: "I have had 25 years of working across lots of different brands like Nike, Nordstrom, Louis Vuitton, Hyatt, Shiseido, and Apple."

Natalie Kelly [09:58]: "We started writing the book last year in spring, so 2024, around March."

---

3. The Importance of Cultural Intelligence in Customer Experience (CX)

Catherine and Natalie emphasize that understanding cultural differences is paramount for effective CX. They illustrate how varying expectations can impact service delivery, highlighting the need for brands to adapt their strategies to resonate with local markets.

Notable Quotes:

Catherine Melchiore [16:19]: "Service is actually one of those that is the most important. Right. Because it's hard to see, it's hard to grasp. You know, you say, I want service. But what does that mean?"

Natalie Kelly [17:19]: "When you think about B2B and you have more touch points and you have more people who are part of the buying committee, every little detail of the customer experience matters."

---

4. Real-World Examples of Global Branding Success

KitKat’s Cultural Adaptation: Catherine shares how KitKat tailors its flavors to local tastes while maintaining its core brand elements. In Japan, for instance, KitKat offers over 300 unique flavors, such as matcha and sakura, illustrating the balance between global consistency and local innovation.

HubSpot’s NPS Challenges in Japan: Natalie recounts HubSpot's experience with Net Promoter Score (NPS) in Japan, revealing that cultural differences led to misinterpretations of survey questions. This prompted the development of tailored customer satisfaction surveys to better capture local sentiments.

Notable Quotes:

Catherine Melchiore [42:36]: "KitKat has an amazing approach to this. So not only, I mean, I've watched KitKat because of all my time in Japan, and Japan happens to be an outlier. Even within KitKat, they have over 300 different flavors that they've had over the years."

Natalie Kelly [46:25]: "We realized, oh, you'll never get a high score in Japan because there is no such thing as perfection. So you're never going to get the high end of the score."

---

5. Technology and AI in Global Marketing

The conversation shifts to the role of technology and AI in shaping global CX. Catherine and Natalie discuss how different regions adopt AI uniquely, influenced by local needs and cultural attitudes. They caution against over-reliance on AI, stressing the importance of human judgment and contextual understanding.

Notable Quotes:

Natalie Kelly [61:24]: "AI is not additive or subtractive, but transformative. And I think it's not taking something away, it's not adding something, it's transforming the way we do things."

Catherine Melchiore [66:42]: "It's all about how you use it, right. Just like anything. And the framing is so important and learning from it is so important so that we don't shortcut ourselves by outsourcing things."

---

6. The Critical Role of Data in AI Adoption

Effective AI utilization hinges on high-quality, well-structured data. Natalie highlights the challenges of data cleanup and standardization necessary for AI tools to function optimally across different markets. Catherine adds that inconsistent data can lead to diluted brand messaging and ineffective AI outputs.

Notable Quotes:

Natalie Kelly [72:38]: "Your AI outputs are only going to be as good as the data and the data assets that you are using."

Catherine Melchiore [75:41]: "There's a real risk of AI actually diluting what that brand stands for because everyone's going to channel into the same generic content rather than distinguishing it."

---

7. Final Takeaways: Leadership Lessons for Global Success

Catherine and Natalie offer key insights for leaders aiming to navigate the global landscape:

• Listening and Observing: Emphasize active listening and non-verbal cues to understand diverse customer needs.

  Catherine Melchiore [76:06]: "Do more listening than you do speaking. And especially when you go to a market, I would say listen with your eyes."

• Curiosity and Adaptability: Maintain a curious mindset and be willing to adapt strategies based on local insights.

  Natalie Kelly [77:13]: "Curiosity begets growth whether you're talking about moving into a new market, whether you're talking about growing yourself."

• Intentional Use of Technology: Leverage AI and other tools intentionally, ensuring they complement rather than replace human interaction.

  Lacey Peace [74:47]: "How do I get that into a place where I can actually use it and educate my AI systems more effectively."

Notable Quotes:

Catherine Melchiore [77:12]: "Listening with your eyes is crucial because so much of communication is not necessarily verbal."

Natalie Kelly [78:15]: "Curiosity is so important when you're moving into new cultures, moving into new markets, moving into a new job."

---

8. Connect with the Authors

For those eager to explore further, Brand Global Adapt Local: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and directly through the publisher Kogan Page.

Stay Connected:

• Catherine Melchiore: LinkedIn
• Natalie Kelly: LinkedIn

---

This summary encapsulates the rich discussions from the "How to Lead Brands That Translate Globally" episode of Experts of Experience, providing actionable insights for professionals aiming to excel in global customer experience and brand management.

Transcript

[Natalie Kelly]

In the US we often say the customer is always right. And in Japan, the saying is the customer is God.

[Lacey Peace]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Natalie Kelly]

So even understanding different levels of expectations around what customer experience is is very important. And they are not the same in every market.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Service is actually one of those that is the most important. Right. It's hard to see you say, I want service, but what does that mean? Some people want you to respond immediately and many, many times and on a certain channel. Other people work in different channels and they don't want to be bothered.

[Natalie Kelly]

The truth is everything that touches a customer is important. And so it makes it very challenging to figure out, okay, which aspects of those do we localize, which do we adapt? Which do we treat with care? Which should we remove from the experience?

[Lacey Peace]

Oh, absolutely.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Statistically, we know that 77% of global consumers prefer to buy from brands that share their values in their own language.

[Natalie Kelly]

When you think about B2B and you have more touch points and you have more people who are part of the buying committee, every little detail of the customer experience matters. If you are building for one culture, one country, and that's your myopic thinking, it makes it very hard to scale later on.

[Lacey Peace]

Even if you're not a business, thinking that you're going to be global, being able to be culturally flexible and agile will still matter because cultural things shift internally in countries all the time. What are you seeing with AI adoption across different businesses and customers around the world?

[Natalie Kelly]

AI is not additive or subtractive, but transformative.

[Lacey Peace]

What's at stake if I don't do this? What are the blind spots that I may be missing if I am not taking into account these different cultural perspectives? Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Peace. And we've got Rose Shocker here as well. We just got done talking to Catherine Melquire and Natalie Kelly, who are the co authors of a book called Brand Global Adapt Local how to Build Brand Value across Cultures. And this was just such a fun convo. Correct me if I'm wrong, Rose, but I'm pretty sure this was our first multi guest episode of Experts of Experience.

[Rose Shocker]

I think you're right. And it was so cool to have two voices in the room, especially theirs. I mean, they have such versatile backgrounds. Katherine's a former executive of Louis Vuitton, Nike, Nordstrom, Hyatt and Shiseido. And she's lived and worked in Japan and France and Germany. And then Natalie is more on the B2B side. She was at Executive at HubSpot. And yeah, this is Natalie's actually her fourth book and second as a co author.

[Lacey Peace]

Wow. Yeah. And Katherine and Natalie, like, they were just so much fun. This is a really fun, entertaining episode to listen to, but it's also super strategic. So if you are, and I feel like this is for everyone, if you're a brand that's already global, you need to listen to this to understand the different things that your local teams might be running into as problems or successes. Right. And if you are maybe a smaller company looking to go global, this is going to give you sort of a playbook, a guide of how to do that. Right. How to think about different values in different countries, how to think about different customer experiences whenever you start to go global. Or maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's that you want to break into a new market, like a different gender, different age group, some other kind of expansion with a new product. All of the things we talk about in this episode will help you think about how to do that. Right.

[Rose Shocker]

Regardless of where you're based or where your team's based, you know, never know who's going to walk through your doors or pick up the phone and call you. This was such a cool episode because it really taught me how much language impacts perspective and culture. I mean, they gave real world examples of how Japanese executives might handle a poor customer interaction versus somebody in the Netherlands. It's so crucial to have a good understanding of how you can globally scale, even if you don't plan on scaling.

[Lacey Peace]

And adapt your business and brand to a local market. Right. So if you've got this beautiful brand story that you've constructed, the brand promise that you put together an amazing product and you want to deliver that. People won't hear that if you're not speaking the same language. And I don't mean that as in you actually need to be speaking the same language as them, but you need to be able to communicate with them directly in a way that they would understand. So they gave a bunch of stories of like, maybe common phrases or things that we just assume in the US that you go to a different country, they would have no context of what that phrase is, or they wouldn't know what story you're referencing. Their communities are completely different. And one of the most interesting things that I heard was about metrics and how you might have a KPI that you're like, oh, nps. We should totally be tracking that across wherever we are globally. What if how someone, a customer is interpreting that. That survey is completely different in. Let's say Germany than in Mexico. So the questions are being interpreted differently. Can I actually then take that metric and side by side compare them? No, you can't, because it's completely different responses and completely different understanding of what's a 10, what's a 5, what's a 1 when it comes to service?

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah, that's so true. Katherine, she is a lecturer at UC Berkeley Business School, and she spoke to how she is coaching her students to use AI effectively. We talked a little bit about how some teams are struggling right now with completely offloading all of your work or all of your tasks, especially some that are creative, that take creative brainstorming into a GPT instead of doing that. It's actually gonna take some work to understand what balance looks like when it comes to AI and how you can better collaborate with AI tools rather than try to give your entire workload off to a GPT and then it spits out less than quality work. So I thought that was really cool how from a lecturer and a professor standpoint, of how they are working with students to train and develop their AI skills.

[Lacey Peace]

Katherine and Natalie also talk a lot about what's at stake if you don't do this, if you don't embrace having more cultural intelligence in your company, in your brand, if you don't embrace acting locally while you're global, what's at stake? What would happen? You know, how much money really is on the line, how much customer trust is on the line if you don't do these things. And that said, there's mistakes that you will make when you go global, but how quickly can you learn from those mistakes and apply them to improve the business over time?

[Rose Shocker]

Okay, before we let you guys get to the episode, be sure to hit that, like, button. Hit subscribe. So you're tuned in every week. We have a new episode that comes out every Wednesday. And head to Lacy Peace's LinkedIn page. Comment on any of her posts, send her a message, send her a connection request, and let her know exactly what questions you'd like answered and what companies or executives or leaders that you think we should have on the show next.

[Lacey Peace]

And with that, here's Katherine and Natalie, authors of Brand Global Adapt Local how to build Brand value across Cultures. Well, Natalie and Katherine, welcome to the show.

[Natalie Kelly]

Thank you, Lace.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Thank you. So happy to be here.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah, I'm so excited to have both of you. And we. This is our first Experts of Experience interview where we have two people on mike. So thank you for, you know, bearing with me as we navigate having a panel of discussion today. I'm really excited for it and I would love, before we jump into the content and, you know, the whole conversation we want to talk about today, I would love an intro from each of you. So, Natalie, do you mind just doing a quick intro and then Catherine, we can hear from you as well.

[Natalie Kelly]

Sure. I'm Natalie Kelly. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Zappy. This is my fourth book with Katherine, my second book, and love to be here. Thank you so much for having us.

[Catherine Melchiore]

And my name's Catherine Melchiore and I'm the lead author of Brand Global Adapt Local how to Build Brand Value Across Cultures. I have had 25 years of working across lots of different brands like Nike, Nordstrom, Louis Vuitton, Hyatt, Shiseido, and Apple. And now I teach global marketing at University of California, Berkeley School of Business.

[Lacey Peace]

Amazing. Yeah. And how did you two meet?

[Catherine Melchiore]

This is sort of a fun story. So I in my class, for the first day of class, I tried to give students some easy introductions to global marketing because it can get quite complex. And I came across in Harvard Business Review an article called Blind Spots of Doing Business Internationally. And it had some really salient points that were exactly that. They were ideas that I knew are very true and they can stump people all the time. And it was written by a woman named Natalie Kelly. And I'm thinking, I should have written this. I love these stories and stuff that I know and I've experienced and I kept thinking, I wish I had written this. So every year I teach it and every year I think about this woman named Natalie Kelly. And then suddenly I, on my LinkedIn a said Natalie Kelly commented on one of my posts and I'm, I wonder if it's the same person. And I realized this is a woman who had all this international background like me. And so we kind of connected through that. And then I think she suggested, well, let's talk sometime. And so we had a one on one. And in the middle of that, I said I was writing a book and she offered to help.

[Lacey Peace]

Wow. Wow. So a LinkedIn message, LinkedIn comment brought you two together.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Absolutely. It was, you know, here I said she'd written three books. So when we really discussed, well, what it was going to be about, we realized that I have a lot of B2C background and she has a lot of B2B background. So it was kind of a natural marriage. And we actually had never met until we'd finished the book in person.

[Lacey Peace]

Oh my gosh. You're kidding me. You're Kidding me. When did you guys start writing it? What year?

[Catherine Melchiore]

We started it last year in spring, so 2024, around March.

[Lacey Peace]

So you didn't even have the COVID excuse here. I was thinking, oh, they must have written it during COVID so they couldn't meet up. And you guys were just like, no, we're going to do it virtually. That's funny.

[Natalie Kelly]

I think we really had no choice but to do it virtually because we were back and forth across countries, time zone. And also the fun part about this backstory is that once we started engaging on LinkedIn, I had a moment of flashback when talking to Katherine and realizing, oh, this is the same person I read about in the Wall Street Journal almost a decade earlier. Because I had seen this article about Catherine and it was something like, this Hyatt executive has a ball gown in her carry on or something like that. And it was about her globetrotting lifestyle working for these global brands. And I was first time VP of marketing at a tech company and I thought, wow, we have so much in common. I would love to meet her someday. And then all those years later, she was using my HBO article. So it's, it's such an interesting way to connect with someone, you know, through their writing, you know, and through stories about them in the media and as marketers. Like, what a special way to connect. And then virtually collaborating. It's, you know, LinkedIn Zoom. Like, we couldn't have done this book without these technologies. So. Wow.

[Lacey Peace]

Wow, that is so amazing. So you guys are like kind of secretly fangirling over each other for a number of years before you manifested this meeting on LinkedIn, right? So good.

[Catherine Melchiore]

It's really true. And you know, actually the story continues because just last week we were launching our book in Europe at the Con Lyons Creativity Summit and the CMO of LinkedIn, I connected with her too on LinkedIn about something and I told her about the book and she said, oh, we should do an interview at LinkedIn. So I said, well, you're gonna love the story because the two authors actually met on LinkedIn and we realized, actually, Natalie has a whole story of growing her business in Japan and leveraging LinkedIn as a network to find employees. So we were telling this whole story on in a LinkedIn studio interview. And then one of the reasons the this woman, her name's Jessica Jensen, the CMO of LinkedIn. And one of the reasons we connected is because we had both lived in Japan, so we just switched in the interview to Japanese.

[Lacey Peace]

You're kidding me. Oh, my gosh.

[Catherine Melchiore]

I'm not kidding you. Natalie was there going, oh my God.

[Lacey Peace]

I was going to say, Natalie, sorry, what are we doing?

[Natalie Kelly]

Well, I studied Japanese too, but I don't speak well. I've never lived in Japan, been to Japan, but when I heard them start to speak Japanese, I was like, I was a Japanese student in Japanese.

[Catherine Melchiore]

That's like all I could say.

[Natalie Kelly]

But they had a full on conversation and then did actually a bit of an interview in Japanese. And I was like standing there nodding.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah. Oh man, I don't know if I can top that with this interview, y'. All. That is really cool. So amazing. Well, I do want to dive into your guys's book a little bit because, you know, obviously that's, that's why we're here, that's why we're chatting. Could, you know, Natalie, maybe could you give me an intro to the book? What is it about? You know, what's sort of the hook there of why people should be checking this out, why they should be reading it, and maybe a little bit of background of why you guys are both so passionate about this topic and why you want to bring it to market like this.

[Natalie Kelly]

Sure. You know, this is a book about branding globally and building a global brand and adapting as you go into new markets and how to create that long lasting relationship between brands and customers across cultures. And Catherine actually had the idea for the book and was involved with the publisher long before she met me and was working on this based on largely her experiences, but also those of other business professionals who are involved in building these local presence, you know, brand presences in markets while being part of a big global brand. I contributed the chapters on Tech and B2B because that's more of my experience. I'm not a B2C marketer. Haven't done that. I work with a lot of customers who do that today in my role at Zappy. But that is kind of the origin of the book to help people understand how those lived experiences really translate into building lasting brand value across, across cultures. And I'll let Catherine chime in here as well, since she had the whole notion of.

[Catherine Melchiore]

But yeah, I'll say that having done it right for many years. I've lived in Japan for nine years under three different assignments. I've lived in France twice under two different assignments. And I've lived in Berlin for assignments. So having lived in all of these different markets or even when I was working at Nike or Hyatt in the United challenge of building a brand is hard enough. You're trying to really figure out what's your brand's about, what your values are, how to make sure that it, it penetrates all aspects of your activities within a company, within your teams and around the world. But then when you're really working in a specific market, the challenge is how do you bring the brand to life in that market?

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah.

[Catherine Melchiore]

So when you're, whether you're on the ground in that market or in headquarters, responsible for that market, you've got to really go deep to understand the consumers in that market and what their real needs are and how to express the notion of the brand through the cultural prism of that culture so that it lands in the same relative space, even if the way you communicate it is different.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah, yeah. So why do you think, and Catherine, we can start with you on this. Why do you think cultural intelligence like that is so important for cx? How does it affect customer experience? Because a lot of our audience are customer experience leaders and they, they might be just in one part locally in the U.S. for example, or they might be managing brands that are global or they might have multiple different locations in different parts of the US which also has its own different cultural expectations. So, like, how does this cultural intelligence play into CX from a consumer perspective? And then, Natalie, I'd like to hear how it, you know, affects B2B perspectives.

[Catherine Melchiore]

It affects everything. Service is actually one of those that is the most important. Right. Because it's hard to see, it's hard to grasp. You know, you say, I want service. You're all using the same word, customer service. But what does that mean? Some people want you to respond immediately and many, many times and on a certain channel. Other people work in different channels and, and they don't want you to, you know, they don't want to be bothered. Just handle my issue, but don't be too extroverted about communicating all the time. So we try to explain what it's like in various cultures around the world because sometimes it's easier to really understand these explicitly different cultures and their preferences to realize that all of that insight of how they want to be treated are tools and information we can use for various micro communities in the United States.

[Lacey Peace]

And then, Natalie, I'd love to hear how it affects B2B.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because when we were, I was at HubSpot for many years working on growing the global brand and leading international expansion. And one of the things that I learned when we moved into the Japanese market was that in the US we often say the customer is always right. And in Japan, the saying is, the customer is God.

[Lacey Peace]

So, wow, okay, right.

[Natalie Kelly]

So even understanding different levels of expectations around what customer experience is, is very important. And they are not the same in every market. I will tell you, when I lived in Ireland, which my husband's from Ireland, I've been visiting Ireland for many, many years, more than 20 years. But when I lived there as a local consumer and I would walk into the Irish grocery store, I would get annoyed because I was trying to buy something and there's somebody there stocking shelves and blocking me, and I just need to get in and out and get what I'm buying. Well, because labor laws are different there. And employee, how people, how brands and companies treat employees is different. The expectation is, well, they're doing a job. The customer should not get in their way because that's their work. Whereas I, impatient American, am saying, just get out of my way. I'm literally the one with the money here. Like, you know, that's a very American attitude, very capitalist, very. And, you know, it's very hard for me to reconcile that difference. And this is a culture that speaks the same language, you know, is very similar in many ways to American culture, but those subtle differences are baked into culture. And so when you think about B2B and you have more touch points and you have more people who are part of the buying committee, every little detail of the customer experience matters. And you know, one. One example that I often give is when I was working with my team to localize our knowledge base and we were trying to. We're having this conversation, we've got thousands of articles. How do we decide which ones are deserving of human translation versus machine translation, automated translation? Well, how do you assess the value of that? If somebody's got a problem they need to solve at that moment, even if there's only five people who need that per month, that's a high value article. But what about the one that isn't solving the biggest problem, but it has a lot more traffic on it? So how do you decide which are more important? The truth is everything that touches a customer is important. And so it makes it very challenging to figure out, okay, which aspects of those do we localize, which do we adapt? Which do we treat with care? Which should we remove from the experience? You know, how do we adapt those things? Especially when you're going into lots of markets at once. So that is a tricky thing to figure out from a CX perspective.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I would like to hear too, any more examples of this because you guys have both traveled the world so much. Catherine, is there an example that stands out to you? Like the story of being in Ireland at the grocery store that you personally witnessed a moment that you're like, oh, this is a big shift for me.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Yes. It's actually a story in my book. I use it. So when I was vice president of marketing for Louis Vuitton in Japan, unfortunately, we had a problem at a store and the rooftop, a roof tile, ceiling tile fell in a dressing room at a Louis Vuitton store. And I'm the daughter of an American lawyer, so I am very concerned about protection rights. You know, the woman wasn't hurt, actually. It missed her. So that's the most important thing. And I was very, very concerned about this. And the Japanese were like, oh, my gosh, we need to bring her. We need to do something. And so we all agreed we need to do something. She'd been taken to the hospital. She was cleared. She was fine. So again, there was no. It was just emotional trauma. And one would not ever expect this, of course, in the patrol store. And so we met as a C suite to decide what to do. And I'm thinking, okay, we need to get lawyers involved. We need her to issue a statement. He's not going to sue, blah, blah, blah. And the Japanese are like, we're going to bring her a melon, a honeydew melon.

[Lacey Peace]

Oh, my gosh. Okay.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Excuse me. Like, I'm thinking legalities, due process, litigation. And they were thinking, you know, this is certainly. Melons are a luxury fruit in Japan. They're often served at the end of a fine meal. Beautifully, Beautifully cut and served. And they can be over $100 melons. 100, $200. They're sold in boxes with padding, and the little stem has a beautiful little red thing on it. And it's incredible. But it was a completely different orientation about customer service. And in Japan, it's all about the relationship. The relationship with the consumer is so important. And Americans are always very transactional. We're concerned about speed, efficiency, and we don't necessarily think of it as a relationship. When I first was helping businesses go into Japan, before the Internet, when people were buying mailing lists in the United States for direct mail, Japan was. That would never be. You wouldn't sell a customer list. A customer list, like she said, the customer's God. You don't sell your list. It's like selling your family. And so the relationship aspect of a brand and its customers is, on a whole, nother level. It's interesting to look at it that way because it reflects something we talk about in the book is trying to understand the relativity of different cultures. So American culture is very transactional. I paid this money. I want these services. This is what I get for it. It's a barter relationship. And most other cultures in the world are about relationships. And so the whole notion of, are you going to stand by your product after it, Are you there for it? Will you see it through my use case and be there? Even if it's a much longer period? That sense of obligation and responsibility and duty is really great.

[Lacey Peace]

Sometimes scaling means giving your people the backup they need to crush the big stuff. That's where AgentForce comes in. AgentForce gives your team a smart digital workforce that actually gets work done. These AI agents answer customers, route requests, and hand off complex issues to humans seamlessly, all with the full context of your Salesforce CRM. They're not guessing, they're not hallucinating. They're acting on your data and the rules that you set. The result, Faster service, less chaos. And your team gets to focus on work that truly moves the needle. All momentum, no burnout. Visit salesforce.com agentforce yeah, I'm wondering too, as you're talking about this, how important it is to be on the ground physically to see these things. Because I, I feel like you could probably at this point go to ChatGPT and say, hey, I'm starting a business or I'm spanning to Japan and here, like, what are the cultural things I would need to know and understand? And I doubt GPT would say melons are a good way to, like, forgive or, you know, send an apology note to a customer. So, like, I just think there's so much that you can't even articulate, even via like an article or someone reporting it to you. Of all the different ways that you can culturally behave in a country that's different without actually having been there. So, like, how important, maybe Natalie talked to me about how important is it to actually be on site, physically get the emotions, the feelings, to really understand that? Because if I saw that on paper that a melon would be a sufficient apology, I would be like, bs, no way. That's not accurate. That's not right. But then if you're in person talking to them, you would get the vibe, oh, that's actually true. But you would only understand that I feel like physically in person being there.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yes. I mean, I think what happens is when you are immersed in a culture, you have a fast Track to learning and gaining those insights very deeply and quickly. You can certainly learn that from working with people. You know, in the pandemic, we all had to work across borders virtually if we were in a global company. You do get those experiences, but they're just not as rich. And as you know, you don't have as many of them, so it's slower. You know, I was thinking about the fact that, you know, I worked early in my career as a Spanish interpreter, and I had a lot of exposure to diversity within the United States. States. Because right here at home, we have a lot of diversity and we have opportunities to learn from people from different cultural backgrounds every day. And I was interpreting, and this is a different setting. It was for health care. I was interpreting for a speech language therapist, and the patient was recovering. So it was basically she was asking her simple questions to try to get her to practice her language and her vocabulary. And she was giving me the questions in English. I interpret them in Spanish, and she would give me back the answers. One of the questions was, well, who drives the fire truck? The fireman? Who drives the school bus? The bus driver? And this was all about occupations, you know, the whole area. And she said, who would you borrow a cup of sugar from? And the woman was so confused. You know, this was a Spanish speaker, you know, probably. Probably from rural Latin America who had immigrated here. She was like, why would I need a cup of sugar? Such a Midwestern baking type culture, you know, maybe the South, Like, I know, because I grew up there with a baking family that you borrow a cup of sugar from, is your neighbor. But that was. That's not a cultural practice that exists in many places. In fact, probably a lot of places in the United States, you wouldn't be able to ask that question and get the same answer. So the therapist kept trying to ask this question, like, well, you know, if you were making something at home and you didn't you have a cup of sugar on hand, like, who would you ask? And she's like, I don't know. Well, she was getting frustrated, then pivoted the question and said, okay, let's go back to some other types. We'll skip this question. And she said, who grows the food? Again, she was stumped. And I was thinking, this is the farmer, you know. And so I said, who grows the food? I said, would you mind if I adapt this question so she can get the answer? And in Spanish, I said something to the extent like, who grows food for lots of people, you know, to try to get her to Understand, like large scale farming. And she said, God, that's so sweet. And in her culture, you know, you plant things and things grow and like, you know, from her perspective, and then we get into education levels, literacy levels, you know, disparities, and there's a lot that interpreters have to deal with in those types of situations. But it just really highlighted for me differences between cultures, differences between language, and how those things go unseen all the time in daily society, in a diverse society. So I would say it's not only about living in another country that's a fast track, but it's about being open to the experiences, because there are a lot of expats who go abroad and only interact with other Americans and never take those learnings. You know, Catherine and I talked about the fact that we're the opposite. Like, when we go and live abroad, we're, like, trying to stay away from the Americans because we want to optimize the opportunity to learn. So I think it's about, like, opening yourself up and being curious as to, oh, why does this person see it that way? And why are. Why. What's different about their background and the way they were raised? Maybe their religion, maybe their literacy levels, maybe all those things that. That deepens our empathy for the people that we're trying to communicate with.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah. I found two. Reading is such a great way to do this. Whenever I was younger, so my dad was in the military and we grew up all over the place. I spent several years, my formative years in Germany, and I remember, like, a huge part of our education on the military base was actually reading books that were written from different countries or written about children who were living in different countries. And I got so much exposure, even at age 10, of like, oh, this person's life is completely different than mine. And I'm able to see from her or his perspective through this reading, through this material. So I, Yeah, I just, I want to echo that too, that it's not just like, you need to be there on the ground, but there's a lot of different ways that you can learn these cultures. But it definitely requires being able to see from someone else's lens. Like, you could have had that same experience, Natalie, but been like, no, you're wrong. No, you're wrong. Like, it's the neighbor, it's the farmer, but you, instead of being. You're wrong, you went from. I'm curious. Let me put myself in her frame of mind, in her shoes, and see what the right answer from her perspective is. So I definitely think there's a lot of different ways to gain that empathy. Catherine, is there anything you wanted to add to that?

[Catherine Melchiore]

I have lots of thoughts. I'll limit them to two that are relevant. One is you were asking about AI, right? So you couldn't ask AI and say, what are you supposed to do in this culture? The same way I use an example about in France, I love saying, what are the two most important words in France? In French, Excuse me? And in France, you know, and what do you think they are? Right. Most people, when I ask this question, they say, oh, you know, merci or silver plat. And I'm like, okay, that's, you know, at least three. And so the trick is that it's, it's. And so some people sometimes say bonjour, and I'm like, well, that's half of it. But it's Bonjour monsieur or Bonjour, madame, and it's super important. It's the same kind of thing. Because when you go into a store or when you're buying a newspaper, if anyone buys newspapers anymore, getting a coffee or a croissant in the store, if you don't greet someone, they feel that you're disrespectful. And so you will get a burnt baguette, right? And so no one teaches you that if you take French, you're not taught to say Bonjour monsieur or Bonjour, madame. You're taught to say, you know, je voudrais un croissant, I want a croissant. Right? But it's those subtleties about culture that are so important. And again, unfortunately, AI is not going to give you that. The other thing I was going to say is about this notion of what you just said, Lacy, is putting yourself in the other person's perspective. What's super interesting is if when they look at young children, if you put an 18 month old bilingual child or, you know, not all 18 month old kids speak two languages, but that are exposed to two languages. It's called the banana test. If someone is facing a child and there are two bananas and the child is asked, you know, give me the banana. And the person facing you can only see one of them. Let's say there's a book in between them. The child who is monolingual won't know which banana to give the person. The child who is exposed to two languages will see that the person in front of them can only see one banana and hand them that banana.

[Lacey Peace]

Wow. Wow. I also do this test. So my son I mentioned, he's in The Montessori School. It's a Spanish immersion program. So he's completely all day speaking Spanish, So I want to do this test with him. That's very interesting.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Absolutely. He's three years old, right?

[Lacey Peace]

Yep.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Yeah. It's amazing. And it makes you realize how learning another language certainly teaches you the skills of communication, but it gives you a perspective of someone else's viewpoint.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yes.

[Lacey Peace]

Very, very interesting. I love that example.

[Natalie Kelly]

And this ties back to what you said earlier, Lacy, about reading and connecting to people through their stories. You know, one of the reasons that being on the ground gives you more access to those stories is because you have more opportunities to interact with more people. And, you know, it can be a fast track. But I remember when I was younger, we used to have this thing called pen pals.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Yes.

[Natalie Kelly]

So I wrote letters to kids all over the world because I was in a tiny rural town in the middle of nowhere, population 2,500 people, and we didn't have a lot of diversity, and I was many hours away from the nearest major city. And so that was one of the ways that I connected. And I had friendships with people in Malaysia, Peru, Ireland, you know, other countries around the world. And I think the earlier we can give people, whether they're our children or our employees, you know, access, the better, and the faster they will open up and have those connections. You know, we had a program that was very simple at HubSpot that I put into place. It was just an informal coffee chat program, a buddy program. Hop on a Zoom, call for 30 minutes and talk to somebody about anything you want, you know, but they have to be from another office, from another country. The amount of things that happened from that little coffee chat were incredible. And this was all remote and all highly global. And, you know, during the pandemic, it became even more important. But those interactions, you know, whether they're snail mail or zoom calls or on the ground, they all add up, and they're all important. And.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think setting the stakes for the audience, too, on. On this, Right. Like, what's at stake if I don't do this? If I. Like, what are the blind spots that I am maybe missing if I am not taking into account these different cultural perspectives? Because I could see a business leader maybe sitting in their office hearing this right now and saying, yeah, I guess it's kind of nice if we, like, acknowledge some of the cultural differences, but it's not going to actually drive the bottom line that much that I should really care about it. So, like, I want to Say, that's wrong, and I would love to put the stakes down here. No, actually, this is driving some serious business impact if you don't do this. Catherine or Natalie, do either one of you feel compelled to speak to that?

[Catherine Melchiore]

Yeah. I mean, statistically, we know that 77% of global consumers prefer to buy from brands that share their values in their own language. Okay. And the fact that brands today, many of them might say, oh, you know, this is all hogwash. I'm just going to do what works here in another country. Yeah. It's not only lost opportunity of revenue, that's the one that they'll never see, but they can have costly missteps that are actually eroding their opportunity to maintain a given level of business, and then they ruin the possible trust that they have. Right. So if you can't respond to someone's expectation in the way that they want you to, they are no longer going to feel as confident in you and your services. We talk a lot about trust in the book because everyone always says trust is important. Right. Businesses say it internally, and then obviously a brand is nothing if it's not a promise in the marketplace. And I once heard a definition of trust that I loved and I use it all the time, and I put it in the book. Basically, trust is built out of three things. It starts with shared values. Okay. So you've got to be clear on what your shared values are. We know values are often not really clear like we had talked about before in terms of service. And then you have to be able to have open communication. You have to be able to share your views with one another. And the third part that's so key is a history of promises kept. So a brand for you to believe in, a brand, you see something in the marketplace, usually represented by its logo or an advertisement or, you know, catchphrase or social media. And all of the things you see are offering some kind of a promise. Right. If you buy this brand, if you use this, you will get some kind of service or satisfaction. If the brand doesn't deliver that, that trust is broken. Right. So trust is really important for any brand and for any relationship. And it's that much more complicated when you're dealing with values that are subtle and slightly different in different countries.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah, yeah. I was going to add in terms of, you know, what will the CEO say about why any of this should matter? You know, it's everything Catherine said. I think it's also the fact that if you don't do this, you incur a debt that is very hard to pay back later on. So if you are building anything, a team, a business, a product, a marketing campaign, and you're only thinking with your proximity bias of I live in this country and this is the culture I'm familiar with, it isn't scalable later on. So a big problem that I saw often at HubSpot was, you know, in tech we often talk about technical debt or engineering debt or coding debt. We have to go back and re engineer something, rebuild it, because it wasn't built right in the first place. I talk about globalization, debt. If you are building for one culture, one country, and that's your myopic thinking, it makes it very hard to scale later on. So if you sometimes can do things 10% differently, it will save you a thousand percent of rework. Then it takes just a tiny fraction of more work to set it up right from the start so that you have global extensibility than it does to later go back and re engineer and rebuild. Getting the framework right up front and the mindset right up front to make it extensible into more than one place is so important. It saves businesses so much time and cost. It's, it's incredible if you do it thinking global from the start.

[Lacey Peace]

Well, and I too, even if you're not a business thinking that you're going to be global, maybe you're not planning on that, maybe you're like, I'm what I'm offering, I'm specifically trying to be local, I'm trying to be in the US this is what I'm doing. Being able to be culturally flexible and like agile will still matter because cultural things shift internally in countries all the time, right? So like if you build this business and you're very set and these are the values and this is how we run our company and this is how everything is done and we're not going to change, we're not going to expand globally. That doesn't really matter because in 10 years the cultural values of your, your current country might be shifting. So being able to have that ability to be agile out the gate and build it from that perspective matters no matter what you're planning to do, whether you're planning to expand globally or stay local.

[Natalie Kelly]

That's right. And even if you're planning to stay local, what if you want to target a different segment of the US Market? You know, what if you want to have an offering in Spanish because it's a huge population that speaks Spanish natively in the United States? What if your business is expanding into Texas or Florida or any different age groups. And that's the thing. A lot of the time when you know, a lot of these payments, whatever, you know, take any aspect of business. If you're thinking with building in that flexibility from the start and that ability to adapt, you leverage it in so many ways, so many other ways that might have nothing to do with culture, language, country, it might be demographic as you said, or it could be gender, it could be many, many things.

[Catherine Melchiore]

But you know, that notion of flexibility that you mentioned, that's one of the hallmarks. There are a couple hallmarks of cultural intelligence, cultural intelligence. The first one is the attitude that we've talked about before, right? Is you have an open mindset rather than saying it should be this way to shift it around and go, what might it be, right? Being open is super important. That's really the foundation. And after that, then once you're open, it's to become aware, to try to notice some of the things that Natalie was just talking about, about how these people couldn't answer these questions about who grows the vegetables. What does that mean? Culturally it's not that the person's stupid, but it's that they didn't understand the question. So that's mindset of being aware of where there are subtle barriers is really important. Then you learn about the culture. But the last part is this notion of flexibility. It's actually called style switching or culture switching. Being able to have multiple tools and responses at your disposition so that based on how the person is expecting to be treated and sometimes they won't say it, sometimes it's non verbal. So for you to be able to see that and then respond accordingly is the last part of what is called cultural intelligence.

[Lacey Peace]

So we've kind of teased a lot of ideas here. Now we've talked about, you know, missteps, mistakes, blind spots, you know, why this is important, how this helps the bottom line, why it affects B2B and B2C different cultural examples from your guys own experiences. I would love to hear a story or two about a business that has done this, right? Like they went in, they're like, we're going to expand globally and here's like a prime example of how you do it right? Or maybe you've got a prime example of how not to do it. So one of those would be awesome. Catherine, if you want to start and then Natalie, we can also have an example from you.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Well, I'll start with one that is a product I love and I think a lot of people know it and they may not realize how adaptable it truly is. And that's Kit Kats. So we all, you know, we all know what a Kit Kat is, but not all of us may know how it flexes across culture. Food and drinks are an industry that are particularly sensitive to this because taste is local. And KitKat has an amazing approach to this. So not only, I mean, I've watched KitKat because of all my time in Japan, and Japan happens to be an outlier. Even within KitKat, they have over 300 different flavors that they've had over the years. You know, they have matcha and sake and azuki bean. Yeah, they pumpkin, I mean, all kinds of things depending on the season. Or, you know, they actually have the sakura when it is the cherry blossom season. So they play into local taste, into seasonality. But I have a story that comes from Malaysia and it had to do with During COVID when KitKat was in Malaysia and people's tastes were changing, people were getting very concerned because we were so unhealthy about eating healthy things. And that could be quite difficult for a chocolate bar. Moreover, we all face, remember the supply chain troubles that we had. And 3/4 of all cocoa comes from Ghana in Africa. So they couldn't get all the cocoa. But KitKat was number one in Malaysia. It's a big market. And the KitKat brand manager in Malaysia realized that it didn't have to all come from Ghana, that even in Malaysia they had rainforests. And those rainforests were traditionally growing palm oil. And they could work with farmers to stop the bad part of palm oil that we know is sustainably toxic and instead shift the farms to build it to create cocoa. That rainforest local cocoa was naturally darker in chocolate content and so it was healthier. And so between those two challenges, they created a whole new solution, which was a new Kit count flavor for KitKat called KitKat Borneo 52% Dark Borneo 52% to call out how much chocolate was in it. And so I love this story because everyone knows KitKat because why when we think of KitKat, we think of, you know, the red logo. So the red logo is global everywhere. And we think of those little fingers, right? You open the packaging and you have like two or four fingers that you break. No matter what flavor it is. Those four, two to four fingers are always guaranteed part of their brand. Plus the third part is the wafer and chocolate mix. So what KitKat does is those three things are not flexible, they are must haves for the brand. But beyond that, they challenge their local teams to Innovate beyond that. They can do whatever they need to please their audience. And so there's a concept we explain in the book called freedom within a frame. And that's kind of one of those best practices for brands. It doesn't matter what your frame is, and it can differ by industry and by brand. But in this case for KitKat, their framework was those three aspects that were not allowed to be changed. But beyond that, then the teams were challenged and motivated to get creative with it.

[Lacey Peace]

I love that story. And now I'm hungry for a Kit Kat, so thank you, Katherine. I haven't had one in years.

[Natalie Kelly]

Me too. I'll share something that may be interesting for listeners on the CX side about HubSpot going into Japan, which I write about in the book as well. And it's kind of a funny story because I was heavily pregnant at the time, so my launch date was right over my due date. So I was trying to make sure we got that launch right. And before my baby arrived.

[Lacey Peace]

Oh, my gosh.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah, it was quite, quite an interesting result. But what I wanted to share that I think may be of interest to listeners on this topic of how to get it right and how brands get it right, is many of your listeners will be familiar with NPS or Net Promoter Score as a way to measure, you know, customer satisfaction or have an indication of, you know, how likely people would be to recommend your brand. And we localized that question for all of our different markets and did the Net Promoter Score survey. And what was very interesting was that we realized, oh, you'll never get a high score in Japan because there is no such thing as perfection. So you're never going to get the high end of the score. And the way it's calculated, that means, like, you're not going to have many promoters, if any, in that market compared to the US So the benchmarks are actually different. And we also saw that in Latin America, the scores were incredibly, effusively high. No matter what we did, like, people would score us like nine or 10, like they were promoters. But they'd say, but you failed at this, this, this and that in the comments. And so it was very confusing. So what we ended up doing was we created a different survey because we're like, there's no way we can compare apples to apples to understand, you know, how the experience is different and what we need to adapt. So my team developed a customer satisfaction survey that was easier for people to interpret in a similar way across cultures, but the tool itself needed to be adapted to Even get the feedback in a way that we could. Yeah. And so that just goes to show the extent of cultural bias and how much that's woven into our daily practices. We're like, oh, we'll just use the same survey tool in the same way of asking the questions. We couldn't use that. In fact, even though we, we localized and adapted the survey questions perfectly. You know, the, the core question is, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? People would say, zero, because I don't have any friends or colleagues that use this, that need this. They were literally detractors because they didn't interpret the question the way we thought they would because they're not familiar with the question. So it taught me so much about how important it is to really think about every detail of how are we asking the question, what type of feedback are we trying to get? Is it going to be actionable? So we had to just throw, throw that out for certain purposes and use something different and use it globally to really uncover why is this aspect of the experience in this country so poor? Or where can we elevate this? Or why? What are we doing right in that market that's so good? Can we borrow that and take it to this other market? This is really interesting because what you learn is as a company, and you're going into new markets, you're at a different stage of your journey in each market. So even though you might think, oh, well, the way we do it in the US is this. How long have you been in the US 10 years, 15 years. Then it's your first year in Japan, your second year in France, you're at a different stage. So the technique should not be the same, the tactic should not be the same. So I call it HubSpot as an example of a company, B2B, that did a lot of things right, but also had a ton of painful learnings along the way. I think every company that goes global has to have those moments earlier, the lessons learned. That's how you grow. That's part of the experience.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah, yeah. And I think there's an interesting. Well, I'm glad you said first, I'm GLAD you mentioned KPIs and metrics in that because I had not thought about that. And that makes total sense. So having lived in Germany, I know the way that people respond to things is completely different. There is no such thing as perfect. You got a C or 70%. You did well. That's great. That's fantastic. You did great. You would have to blow me away, pick me up in a limo, hand delivered my favorite food to my door to get an A or 100% or 10 out of 10 score. So totally think that's a fair thing. And I'm glad you shouted that out. But I'm curious too, from like a technology perspective because you mentioned technology being a little bit different and how you would roll this out. How have you guys seen technology adoption vary from country to country? And is there any kind of like, general advice you could give of like, in Europe it's like this, in Asia it's like this. That maybe listeners would benefit from understanding?

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah, I'm happy to jump in. And Catherine, you have other examples to share. One thing that's really interesting is a lot of times people think that if it's a developing market that it's less technologically advanced. Actually, many companies or many countries in Latin America skipped kind of straight to mobile. And so we're mobile first way before Americans were. And so there's a lot of places like that where it's like, oh, mobile payments and adoption of specific applications of technology is actually way more advanced and the uptake is higher in some countries versus others. So I think it's really important to understand locally, like, what are the differences in how these technologies are used and in fact, in some cases what are the different technologies that might not even be known to us in other countries. HubSpot is a CRM, and when we went into Japan, we realized, oh, a lot of people use business card scanning apps to import data into their CRM, whereas in the US they had abandoned business cards by then. And so nobody really had business cards anymore. So it wasn't a thing. But that presenting that card in a specific way in Japan is very important and may still be important. I haven't been there recently and don't know, but that was an example of, oh, that's a whole area of tech that we don't even have a need for in our home country. But if we're going to have a big presence in that market for a CRM company, it's absolutely an essential. We won't succeed without it.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Yeah, I think it's really important to sort of look at how tech innovates in different countries. And it's both cultural, but it's also governmental cultural is, for instance, that, as Natalie's saying, certain markets just leapfrog through because they don't necessarily have the infrastructure that we have in certain markets, developed countries. And so they go much further forward. So like in Brazil, it is Not a cash market. It's very hard to use cash. Right. Whereas in certain other markets like I was in India and you can still use catch but then I'm in a small remote town and there's a farmer with all of his fruit and he has a little QR code right there to be able to pick on the side of the road, you know, that's very good. It's really kind of incredible. So that's the user led issues because of economic challenges and innovation. But on the other hand there's also the government, right? So privacy is controlled by the government. So in Europe there's very, very strict privacy laws that are protecting the consumer and the United States is much more open and loose about that. And the Google's Vice president of global marketing, Marvin Chao, who is also in the book from previous work he had done, but he talks about how, you know, because of that Google is not spending as much of its focus on the eu, right. They can't be as active and penetrating the market. And so from their perspective from a business innovation, they're going to focus on the markets where they can move faster. Whereas from the consumer perspective. I lived part of the year in France and I kind of like the fact that I know my personal information is protected.

[Lacey Peace]

We all expect fast service now, but inside most companies, speed is still a struggle. It's the approval chains, the handoffs, the who owns what debate. Agent Force cuts through the mess and actually takes action. It talks to your customers, crushes tasks and keeps things flowing all based on prompts and rules that you set so your customers aren't waiting and your team isn't stuck in the weeds. Speed isn't just a nice to have, it's a competitive edge and Agent Force helps you deliver it 24, 7 learn [e-mail] agentforce.

[Rose Shocker]

Out of curiosity, is there an activity or a routine or a hobby in your personal lives that you feel like sharpens your professional tool set or positively impacts you creatively or strategically? I mean I think about both your backgrounds and how versatile you are. You're both writers like Katherine, you're a lecturer, you're both executives. So I was just thinking about, I feel drained after my 8 hour remote workday and so I'm like, I wonder if there's something in your personal lives, anything like a routine or an activity that energizes you and positively impacts you creatively and strategically.

[Natalie Kelly]

I have one to share. I think language learning is a critical one because it actually does help your brain develop at any stage of your life. It's good for your you when you're young, it's good for you when you're aging. It's good at all stages. And I think what I love about learning a new language is it does stretch my brain. I can literally feel my brain struggling. I often lose interest in a language once I become proficient enough to have a conversation because I'm like, oh, all the hard work's over now. That's the painful process of growing is like figuring out the grammar, figuring out, you know, all those structures. But then once you can navigate a language, then you unlock even deeper layers of understanding. Then you can get into the culture, then you can really start to understand. And what I like about is even if you just learn a couple words on Duolingo, which I use all the time, each little thing you learn is helping you form new connections and help you understand the way the world works and how we interact as humans. And so I can't. I have no tangible proof that that makes me a better marketer, that that makes me a more diversified person that can do different types of things. But I do believe it's linked, I really do, because that's been a passion of mine my whole life. And I think language is how we connect. It's a reflection of culture. It's literally the way we can have relationships with other people is through communication. So without language, you can't have that. So I do believe the more languages you can unlock, the more opportunities you can unlock.

[Rose Shocker]

That's so cool.

[Catherine Melchiore]

I can tell you that that's true. I was CMO at Babel, Duolingo's competitor. And so we did lots of studies.

[Lacey Peace]

Okay. Not to like say anything bad about duolingo, I love duolingo, but I also loved Babel. I used both for a number of years. So shout out to both of them. Both are great.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Yes, yes, exactly. And so the studies show it's exercise for your brain. Right? And we know exercise is really important. It's one, I think, behavior that teaches you to embrace a challenge, to work with people, to push yourself. Right. So. And it gives you energy. Right. Everyone thinks that working out and doing exercise takes your energy, but it doesn't. It actually produces energy. But the way I love to answer this question, I think an under recognized skill in the workplace is being a parent and particularly being a mother. And why I say that because two things. One is, I think if you look at what parents do, they are learning to raise the next generation with values that they want to be both consistent and adapt. So you want to pass on to your children your values, but you want them to bring them to life in a way that is one, right for them personally and two, adapted to their generation. Right. We know that's going to change. So from a brand building and values building perspective, I think that's the case. Moreover, working mothers shout out to working mothers because they know how to multitask. They're incredibly efficient. They are spontaneous and flexible. And when someone is sick or needs something, they know how to respond. And I think that working parents and working mothers in particular, have gotten a bad rap over time because I think that we are in a society that has traditionally not really wanted that. But again, I think when you look at it for what it is and you see the parallel applications for all the skills that are being developed at this time, you realize that actually the truth is, being a parent has numerous benefits to being a manager.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah. I have to add, I have a friend, a mentor, who's been helping us promote the book all over the world. And he used to say, if you want to get something done, give it to a busy working mom. And I used to think, oh, that's kind of horrible. And then I became a busy working mom, and then I was like, oh.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Now I get it.

[Natalie Kelly]

I get it. Because it does create that need to uplevel your multitasking capabilities, and it also helps you zero in on what's actually important. I find that my prioritization skills are so much better because, well, I don't have as much time as I used to to waste time on things that weren't important.

[Rose Shocker]

That's beautiful. I'm so glad. That's gonna be a great clip. I'm so glad that we're talk talking about that. That's definitely not being talked about enough, especially right now. So I love that. Thank you. All right, Lisa, I'll give it back to you.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Thank you for the question.

[Lacey Peace]

All right, I'm gonna pivot us to. We talked a little bit about technology already, but I want to dive into AI. And I know it's like AI hot button topic literally every single episode we do. I'm mentioning AI, but I think it's highly relevant in this conversation for two reasons. I think that there's definitely a difference in AI adoption across the world in different countries. And I think also AI has the potential to help us so we can connect with people better, but it also has the potential to maybe prevent us from connecting as well. So, like, there's a couple different categories there that I would like to start with. The first thing that I think I would like to just hear from your guys perspective is what are you seeing with AI adoption across different businesses and customers around the world? Are you seeing it being consistently adopted and like everyone's on board or is it only like in the US we're just ran and raving about it in LinkedIn but actually elsewhere they're not doing it as much. So I don't know, Natalie or Catherine, whoever would like to start with that.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah, I'm happy to share. You know, I advise a bunch of tech companies in different parts of the world and it's interesting to me how some countries, I'm seeing them embrace AI more for different use cases and different things. You know, I think in the U.S. what I hear a lot of is oh, AI is going to replace humans and take away costs and like replace professions. And that's a kind of a negative way of looking at it. And I don't agree with that. I think it's going to transform the way things are done. And it is, it is. Right now, you know, I'm using AI tools all the time in my job and our company at Zappi, we have been, you know, developing with AI for many, many years and are kind of at the, at the forefront of what we're able to do with it. So I think that AI is not additive or subtractive, but transformative. And I think it's not taking something away, it's not adding something, it's transforming the way we do things. The thing is people need time to experience and gain familiarity with different tools and applications and how they can build them into workflows and things they do on a daily basis, their daily processes. And yes, maybe they will evolve that process and do things differently. As far as, you know, how I'm seeing it play out in different countries, you know, it's interesting because in high cost markets where the cost of living is very high, people have always wanted to automate. So I find for example in the Nordic countries where they have a very high cost of living and a very small population of doers, they've always been early to adopt any technology in, in that part of the world that could make them more efficient. But then in some countries like Japan right now the government has an initiative to boost productivity and that is a really important priority in the Japanese market. So everyone there is questioning, well, how do we make sure we focus on productivity because we have a population that is aging and we have, you know, not as many people having Children and how do we ensure productivity remains high as the future continues? And there's more of a long term view on things in Japan generally. Longer history, culture, et cetera. And so they tend to take a longer term view on things. Whereas a lot of the American cultures, just because it's our bias, we're like, how do we extract economic value from this today? Because we're a capitalist society.

[Lacey Peace]

It's very, I need my investments now. What can I do to prove I'm a unicorn right now?

[Natalie Kelly]

Hire these engineers and let's code everything. With AI, it's very different in terms of the short term view and the long term view across cultures. What I will say is I'm actually very encouraged about AI. I think that the one concern that I have as I'm seeing people, and especially younger generations use it, is we don't want to phone it in and leave everything to AI. You know what I'm seeing sometimes people do is you give them an assignment, they'll just put it into ChatGPT, see what's spit out, and then copy and paste that into an email and say, here's what I came up with. Well, we have to apply human judgment and we also have to realize every circumstance is different. And there's no way that a generic untrained AI tool, unless you feed it lots of context and information, is going to have a relevant response that's better than what a human can come up with. With all our additional knowledge of the circumstances, the situation, our go to market approach, our product, our people, that's where humans really need to be careful not to over index on AI because I think it has the risk of making us a little lazy in our thinking and we need to make sure.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Yeah. So I'll just jump in on that briefly to say it's all about how you use it, right. Just like anything. And the framing is so important and learning from it is so important so that we don't shortcut ourselves by outsourcing things. And I use the example of Google Maps, right. If you ask young people today what's north, south, east or west, or come out of a subway station and turn north, no one knows how to do that. They have lost their geographical awareness and it's because they're outsourcing that skill from their brain. So there are wonderful aspects of Google Maps. I use it all the time. But I think it's also important to marry in my classes. Actually, I have been using AI actually for several years and what I have the students do is I have Them answer a question three times. Once they do it on their own, the second time they use AI and then the third time they combine them and I ask them to do a reflection of what they realized in using AI. It doesn't mean what did you miss, it's what did you realize. And often they realize, oh, you know, AI was really good at helping me get this and this and this. But there was no personal viewpoint as to a judgment if this is good or bad. There was no context. And I think that's the key because we interviewed PhDs for the book as we were finishing it in the conclusion and they said the exact same thing. AI is so incredible, but it doesn't get context. And that's where humans luckily have still an important role to play.

[Lacey Peace]

I love that you're doing that in your classroom. I think that's really important. I've heard mixed opinions from professors that I've talked to who are like, it's not in my classroom. I refuse to let students get the easy way out. You know, and I, I find that completely bogus because this is going to be something that's going to be in people's work lives. Like they're going to leave college, they're going to graduate, they're going to start working. They need to know how to use this. Like, we shouldn't be guilty or ashamed that we're using this tool to help accelerate our learning if in fact we're using it to accelerate our learning and not just to, to copy and paste the output. Right? So I commend you, Katherine, for doing that in your classroom. I think that's great.

[Catherine Melchiore]

You know, it's like any tool. It's any tool. I mean, as a marketer, as I said, I started before the Internet, right? And luckily I started in direct marketing. So the same mental rigor of looking at data to understand response driven actions is super important. And then you just apply it to a new tool and then, you know, it was before TikTok and then TikTok. I had students who said like, what is marketing? They're like, tick tock. Well, that was the latest flavor of the, of the year, you know, and there are, there are always new tools, Always, always new tools. And what I, what I believe is that future leaders, the leaders we're, we're teaching, we have to teach our, teach people how to always learn. You have to always learn and test new tools. And, and as we get more and more dependent on technology, the second thing we have to do is double down on our humanity because at the end of the day, we are humans. We are not robots. The people you're working with are humans. And we still respond to human gestures. And that relationship aspect that we talked about early on.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah, it's so interesting. I know we're all moms, and I just read an article about the fact that a lot of parents of young children are now getting landlines installed in their homes because they're worried about their kids only interacting with each other remotely on apps and things and messaging instead of having like the ability to talk to someone like we used to. And I, you know, I'm having all these experiences because I'm that bit older that we mentioned, like pen pals and snail mail. And, you know, when you write something physically, it does help you remember it more than if you're just taking notes or dictating or any of that. Because there's a connection between your brain and your hand and that's imprinting it in your brain in a way that you can't do without that tactile element. It's so interesting because we talked about the additive nature of these technologies as they're coming along. I think the secret will be in figuring out where do we apply those and what's the benefit versus, you know, choosing some other way that might be an old school way, you know, and, you know, I do this all the time. You know, I remember a time when we used to leave voicemails for each other. I was like the queen of voicemail. Because I would. It was fast, it was easy, and I could do it anytime, anywhere in the world and I knew they would get my message and it was great. It was hyper efficient. Much faster to speak than to type. So I still do that now with like slack audios and WhatsApp audio.

[Lacey Peace]

Voice messages. Yeah, yeah.

[Natalie Kelly]

I mean, because it's hyper efficient and I can vouch for it.

[Catherine Melchiore]

She's doing it to me all the time. Audio.

[Natalie Kelly]

Sorry. Not sorry. But yeah, it's good and it's bad. But how do we use which method in which context? We have more tools available now. I think the secret to really leveraging them properly is going to be intentionality. We do this for this purpose. And I've even thought maybe I should get a landline for my kids. Wouldn't that be cool? But how do I make sure the other moms are also.

[Catherine Melchiore]

What if they.

[Natalie Kelly]

What if they're no longer friends with them and then they don't, you know, I don't have a landline buddy, you know, but it's it's interesting because that does have a benefit that I think we just don't think about, is like, oh, this versus that. Which one am I going to lean into and leverage the specific purpose?

[Lacey Peace]

Well, and it doesn't necessarily have to be versus, right. It can be. And like, I have a landline and I have my iPhone So I can FaceTime grandparents far away. Right. Like, but it's like, when am I choosing to use which one and why and how? And I love talking to other moms about this because it is very intentional. I feel like most moms, and I hope it's most moms, and maybe it's just the community I'm in, we are thinking about these things. We're being very intentional. Social media. When am I going to introduce that? How am I going to introduce that? Because I don't think it is like, I can forego everything. I don't think we can just put a bubble around our children and say they'll never have access to AI or to phones or to video games or whatever. But it's like, how do I teach them skills so they can navigate that world as it changes and it expands? And I know we're getting to parenting advice, so I do want to bring it a little bit back to our AICX discussion before we do close out. I had mentioned a little bit earlier that I am interested in how AI might be changing our ability to communicate more effectively with other people in different countries. So are there any tools or things that you guys have seen recently that is actually supported? Maybe it's sales reps or it's marketing teams that has actually, actually helped them. Not just like we think it might, but have you seen any results from these new AI tools that are supporting people as they try to globally expand?

[Natalie Kelly]

Yes, I definitely have in my work at Zappy. You know, one of the things that's really interesting is it all kind of leads us back to a question of data. You know, your AI outputs are only going to be as good as the data and the data assets that you are using. And so what, you know, initial kind of AI hype curve, you know, everybody was like, oh, you know, we're so excited about all these possibilities. Then to get maximum leverage, you have to start to look at, oh, our data asset is going to require a bunch of cleanup and, oh, if we want to marry this data and this data, oh, we have to actually look at what fields we want. And, like, it's boring work that nobody wants to do.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah.

[Natalie Kelly]

And so it's like oh, we went from the sexy AI to like the underlying boring data work that has to be done to get the most out of the sexy AI tools. So you know, I think a lot of the more nuanced conversations about local, you know, and how do we leverage it for a local market are related to the data structure question because unless you can segment the data by market, you're not going to be able. And the other thing that's interesting with AI is it's developing differently in every country because there's different sources of training data, just like the Internet. You know, the Internet still is not equitable in terms of access because a lot of what's out there is going to surface US English based content. You know, even with Google Search, same things happening with AI right now. It's indexing toward the people who have the most content. And that's what, you know, the training data is, you know, leveraging. What's good about Gen AI is it's not only the quantity of content because it doesn't need as much content to deliver a good result. So I think there's great opportunity here. But I do think it starts with being really clear about structuring your data by country and that's not easy work. You know, I remember when I did this at HubSpot when I first joined, there were like, if I looked at all the different fields and all of our different systems that we were using that were feeding into data sets, There were like 20 different versions of one country. United Space Kingdom u.me. the United Kingdom. United Kingdom and Scotland, you know, United Kingdom uki. Like there were all the, you know, different versions, some capitalized, some not. I mean that's the type of work I'm talking about that humans don't enjoy. And then you have to go and fix that in systems, you know, map fields and it's a lot of boring work, but it's highly, highly valuable once you do it.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I've heard so much about this data problem. Everyone I talk to is it like it starts with these, this data? Because it's like maybe 20% or 30% of my data as actually something I can use and the rest of it is just cluttered, mess, chaos. How do I get that into a place where I can actually use it and educate my AI systems more effectively.

[Catherine Melchiore]

You've asked this before, like what's the risk of not doing it? You know, why, why do you really need to do it? And one of the things that I think needs to be measured is Brands have spent so long trying to get direct access to their customer. They wanted to get rid of retailers, they wanted to get rid of media. Now they have direct access and they can speak to them, they can service them. And instead we're all using the same gen AI programs to ask the same questions. And so suddenly I think there's a real risk of AI actually diluting what that brand stands for because everyone's going to channel into the same generic content rather than distinguishing it. So once again, it comes back to context and how you frame it and understanding what your brand values truly are and how you want to apply them across a cultural prism.

[Lacey Peace]

Yeah, no, that makes total sense. All right, guys, I know we're at time here. I would love to do one final, like piece of advice or leadership lesson or just like a final takeaway that you would like to leave our audience with from each of you. So Katherine, if you wanted to start with just one takeaway or maybe a couple that like, you're like, I didn't get to speak to this yet, or I want to reiterate that this is super important, what would you leave our listeners with?

[Catherine Melchiore]

I think that one of the most important things is listening. Now we talked about language, and I think language is a skill that teaches beyond just the tool of language, as Natalie said earlier. But you have two ears and one mouth. I even say, and so, you know, I say do more listening than you do speaking. And especially when you go to a market, I would say listen with your eyes. Because so much of communication is not necessarily verbal. In America, we're overly dependent on the verbal, on the written, on the contract. And it's to our detriment because most other cultures are once again much more relational. And there's a lot of communication that takes place that is not in words themselves. And so I would recommend people do much more listening to your market, to your teams. And I think from a leadership perspective, that's one of the under leveraged tools for someone who's leading a global team.

[Lacey Peace]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[Natalie Kelly]

I would leave listeners with one lesson very similar to Katherine's talking about learning and listening. It's curiosity. I think curiosity begets growth whether you're talking about moving into a new market, whether you're talking about growing yourself, you know, learning a new skill. A lot of times we go in with assumptions and it's very hard to shred our assumptions and leave them at the door and be curious and ask the right questions. And the more curious we can be, the humbler we are. Assuming that we don't know. And that there's a lot more that we don't know than we think. You know, leaving that at the door and just starting with a beginner's mindset. And curiosity is so important when you're moving into new cultures, moving into new markets, moving into a new job. You know, it's really important to have that. It's very hard. You know, the more experience you can accumulate, the more you think you know. But that's. That's a false pretense. You know, we always have to start with assuming there's a lot more that we don't know than what we know.

[Lacey Peace]

Absolutely. I always say the more you know, the less you know, because I feel like just every time I learn something new, I'm like, well, now there's a whole bunch of things underneath that that I get to learn and expand on. And then there's more, and there's more, and it's like this endless rabbit hole you can always dive into. Well, guys, this has been an amazing conversation. Where can listeners find your book if they're like, oh, my God, I need to read more about this. I'm so interested. I'm intrigued. I want to buy it. I want to order it. Where should they go?

[Catherine Melchiore]

There are multiple places that you can get it. Barnes and Noble is available or at. You can go to Amazon in any of your. In any market. And then you can also go to our publisher, Kogan page.

[Lacey Peace]

Awesome. And can you just state the title again for anyone who's listening that didn't see you? Just hold that up.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Brand Global Adapt Local. How to Build Brand Value across Culture.

[Lacey Peace]

Perfect. Perfect. And there'll be a link in our show notes, y', all, that you guys can click and check it out if you're listening and want to. Want to submit an order. All right, Natalie, Catherine, is there any last place you would like to shout out? Maybe, like, follow you guys on LinkedIn? Is there anything that our audience should do to stay in touch with you guys?

[Catherine Melchiore]

I'd say, you know, it's my first book, and I remember a couple weeks ago speaking to the first group, a group of students from Colorado who had already been using the book. And there was nothing for me like speaking to. I mean, I speak. You know, I speak to students all the time and been leaders in various businesses. And to speak to people who have actually read the book and learned some of these ideas and can contribute their own view. I would say if you read the book and it touches you in one way, it gives you some thoughts, please share it with us. We love hearing from you. In the same way, our curiosity about other cultures as our curiosity about what other people think. I think we can all learn together.

[Natalie Kelly]

Yeah, I would echo that. And also to say anybody who is doing, you know, a class or affiliated with a university or even a women's group or anything like that, reach out, because we are doing a lot of speaking and supporting a lot of these groups. And, you know, it's our dream that more people can learn from our lived experiences and, you know, apply those lessons in their lives and in their companies. So, you know, anybody who's affiliated with a university or college, you know, anywhere throughout the world, so it'd be our pleasure to support you in some way and help the book reach more people and the future, the future generations who are going to be helping us build a more interconnected world.

[Lacey Peace]

All right, thank you so much, Natalie and Katherine. It's been fantastic, and I hope we stay in touch.

[Catherine Melchiore]

Thank you so much. Really great questions. It was really a delight to do this together.